V2, Chap 15 (Sahha), I, p 464 - "Washington DC"

[Richard Ryan]

Mulling over the brief, seemingly insignificant Washington DC episode
in Chapter 464, I realized that Pynchon was taking the time here to do
a little narrative house cleaning as well as recapitulate some key
themes prior to his grand finale.

Above all, this sideways jaunt gives Benny the chance - as I believe
Laura observed - to yo-yo one more time.  As a response to the
possibility of unwanted but purposeful travel (the looming trip to
Malta), *purposeless* travel is a more-or-less recognizable tactic for
Benny to adopt. That he and his buddies go to a flophouse in the
capital's "Chinatown" (a few square block of restaurants, now mostly
torn down) is another of the book's absurd geographic juxtapositions:
the core crew make a mad dash  to our country's famously bland capital
city and wind up in one of the country's cheesier, tinier Asian
ghettos.  I read this combination of bureaucratic banality and
pedestrian exoticism as the kind of  mutation that TRP regards as
symptomatic of a tourist-ridden, post-Baedeker age.

Some other results: it gets Pig Bodine off the stage (one will
naturally decided for oneself if this is a good thing or a bad thing);
it underscores the genuinely institutional and global nature of
Stencil's apocalyptic paranoia when we catch sight of him "nipping"
over to the State Department to "see what he could see" - and what
exactly does Stencil do there, anyway?  There's some implication,
later in the chapter, that the trip to Malta is officially sanctioned.



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty
of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises.
    -- Hannah Arendt